I was recently reading a story in National Geographic about the PETM. If you have never heard of this it is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. If you think that carbon levels in the atmosphere are high now, how about levels about 5 times what they are today? In the Paleocene, the average annual temperature of the earth was 68° F compared with 45° F today--then it went up to 77 by the Eocene. There is no uncertainty about what caused these hot global temps, or the increase in the global temperature...it was a massive release of carbon and methane into the atmosphere about 56 million years ago. There is however speculation as to what was responsible for the "sudden" release of greenhouse gases.
We are somewhere just above 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere right now, while just before this massive release of greenhouse gases there was already 1000 ppm in the atmosphere, thus the high average global temperature to start with. This is not all to say that the world has been through higher carbon levels so we have little to worry about with our piddly 400 ppm. It is to say that carbon in the atmosphere has a direct effect on global temperatures. There is a difference between the PETM and global warming today though. The increase towards a spike of over 1500 ppm happened over thousands of years, while humans will likely quintuple carbon levels over the span of a mere century and a half through their burning of fossil fuel and the resulting cascade of natural carbon release that will be triggered as the Arctic melts.
Remarkably, there wasn't a massive extinction associated with the PETM, though there were massive changes and evolutions that happened during the era. But nature was given time to evolve over thousands of years Species were able to gradually move thousands of miles north or south to find more temperate climes. It's uncertain whether nature will be able to adapt in a mere couple hundred years this time around. Natural systems will also have to contend with the fact that humans are using up nearly every last inch of the planet in their quest to meet the needs and luxuries of an ever-growing population.
Unless something is done soon about the amount of carbon we are releasing, we are headed for disaster. This is why I've come to Dancing Rabbit--to live this way and set an example of how humans can live with a much smaller footprint on the earth. If everyone in the US (the country single handedly responsible for most of the carbon being released) really took seriously this issue of reducing their impact and made deep changes in their lifestyle, it might be possible to turn things around in time. Other countries are doing it on a governmental level, but here in the US our governments are largely impotent because they are dictated by the laws of capitalism. Although I do use many products that were produced by fossil fuel, the amount of fossil fuel I use directly in my life is very minimal, and I can safely say that when I see documentaries about the coal industry destroying mountains in Appalachia and causing climate change, I have little complicity in those crimes.
When you set your mind to creating systems that are not dependent on things that do harm, you find or develop alternatives. We humans think we are so smart and unique, but we act like any other animal in being unable to control our basic animal instincts--consumption and reproduction. When you give an animal abundant food, it will consume the food and increase its population in response. Some humans have the capacity to adapt and survive through their unique ability to problem solve. Others are driven only by their greed. Right now it seems the greedy ones are winning out in directing the fate of humanity and the planet. If we are to survive as a species and preserve the diversity of life on earth, we need the problem solvers to take the upper hand.
